CSI Underworld
by Thor2000
Summary: Grissom, Warrick and Sara face the odd deaths of two juveniles involved in a shooting while Catherine and Nick look into a disappearance.
1. Chapter 1

Las Vegas teemed with lights, the promise of fortune hunters and the glory of the most fantastic displays of extravagance not seen since the days on Ancient Greece. It was the undisputed gambling Mecca of the world. Every day, thousands of star-eyed and unfortunate mortals prayed here for the goddess of luck to shine on them for the monetary gain to help them live in styles of opulence or just deliver them from financial poverty. Others arrived to dive deep into the human cesspool of underground corruption. Rather than live above like normal mortals, these former human beings became living demons and sold foul lethal substances that could take years to kill or used their modern toys with their violently ejected stones to send as many regular people or others of their obscene ilk over to the other side as violently or as creatively as possible. Looking to the skies, many a hope filled mortal wondered what gods divine and pagan could allow this foul spot of humanity and non-humanity continue to exist.

Despite the streets under night lit up by neon signs and the shrill ads for promises of fortune and glory, there was an horizon of human civilization in this area of the desert country side that the tourists, gamblers and degenerated never saw or tried to look for from the limits of their cold desires for would-be fortune always denied them. It was the homes of the people who tossed the cards, sold the drinks, entertained the masses or just made life out here more bearable. Set apart from the degraded areas of the city, the modern suburbia of Spanish-styled villas, family homes of brick or adobe and frame houses of wood sometimes sat beyond the walls of those who made their lives comfortable by both honest and even legitimate means. However, it was not totally free from the apple of corruption and violence that lurked forth from the city. Jason Troy knew that. He had heard in the past gun fire from behind the wood fences where he once played baseball and he saw strange long and foul balloons on the grounds of the high school where he and other innocents had hopeful futures. His favorite modern haunt was All-Star Entertainment, a store indebted to selling anything of media delight from comic books with mighty heroes and busty female crime fighters to VHS tapes of forgotten movies. He had purchased his first DVD Player recently after getting late into the change of technology for distributed movies and was still trying to convert his prized VHS collection. The middle-aged woman behind the counter chatted and laughed with him. She was more than a saleslady to him. She was a best friend. She extended him credit along with all her best and most frequent customers and even delighted from his character improvisations and fascinating tales.

"Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger…" She rattled off the names of his movies. "You really love that Fantasy stuff, don't you?"

"Fantasy?" Jason grinned up to her. "Comedy. Hollywood doesn't get the real story right."

"You would know." Karen beamed toward his expertise in mythology. A few of Troy's artworks on the subject were still for sale behind glass cases in her counter. Bare-chested and muscled heroes facing snake-like creatures and beautiful goddesses on winged horses in flight looked up from under the counter with high prices. Jason grinned to Karen with the look of a best friend and pulled a hundred from the wad in his pocket. It was a thick wad of bills she would like to have to pay off her own bills, but Jason was good for his purchases and always paid her on time. She wasn't quite sure what he did for a living, but she had her suspicions and doubts. No one like Jason who didn't drink or gamble could possibly sell drugs or fraternize with criminals. Nevertheless, she took the hundred-dollar bill he handed over and rang him up for his movies, stack of comics and graphic novels and reached for his change.

"Don't forget…" Karen looked up with her brown eyes. "My Sidewalk Sale is this weekend. I'm clearing my excess inventory again."

"Bright and early," Jason shined. "Call me if you need help setting up."

"I'll take you up on that." Karen gave him his change. "Hit my sign on the way out."

"Check." Jason flipped the sign in the bars on the door to read closed and started walking down the row of stores heading home. Behind him, Karen started shooing off the adolescents playing free video games in her place. Meanwhile, home for Jason was his apartment at Westside Apartments across the street from bungalows and two story frame structures. During the day, stay-at-home dads watered the lawns and mowed the yards while mothers trimmed gardens and watched children bicycling up and down the street. Young boys played ball in the cul de sac and hoped their balls didn't hit the houses, but at night, when the dark shadows stretched over the road and security lights were concealed by trees reaching to starry night skies, something came out of the city following selfish wants and forbidden evils. Boys who once could be counted as human brandished weapons that had changed vaguely over several years or modern hand-sized pistols they counted as tools to their anti-social ways and sought to make themselves stronger by feeding off the normal, the successful and the innocent. Everyone else to them, even their best friends, was the enemy.

A few cars carrying tired-eyed fathers or weary single mothers still followed this road headed for home. Jason just crossed the street looking forward to the rotisserie chicken and steamed vegetables waiting in his refrigerator at home. He waved to Mr. Cho running his favorite Oriental Restaurant closing his place up and then looked ahead to the dirt lot once used to sell used cars for years prior. Mr. Danvers had retired and cleared his inventory. Jason wanted to get his first car from him, and now he was sorry he hadn't. Mr. Danvers had been a father to him and his son a close friend. As he wondered where they both were, he eyed curiously the dark car parked pushed back into the brush next to the office building and tried to explain why it was there. Could Mr. Danvers have left one behind?

A shooting pain struck his back and abdomen and a warm spray of blood rendered through Jason and knocked him to his feet. His paper bag of comics and movie landed beneath him and slightly spilled its contents. Jason stuck his hands up to stop his fall and landed on this left hand first and then his side. His right hand felt to blood pouring from the wound in his belly. As he wondered what had happened, he became aware of two figures hovering over him and trying to rifle his pockets. They wanted something from him, and it wasn't his less than a hundred dollars of Amazing Spiderman and Mighty Thor back issues from Marvel Comics.

"He's still alive!" Someone said. "Get him again!"

"Give me the money!" Another voice ordered!

"Bastards!" Jason kicked one of them down off him. The other one on top of him was a pock-marked black kid a few years younger than himself with silver foil over his teeth and tattooed shapes over his neck. Lacking in any trace of anything resembling human, he forced Jason to his back and scrambled to get his fingers deeper into Troy's front denim pocket for that wad of bills. His partner was Caucasian with white hair and two just as equal hate-filled brown eyes. It was obvious the two of them had already sold their souls to greed and degradation. The glare of the pistol flashed again as another bullet hit the ground after going through Jason's chest.

"I curse you!" Jason could barely breathe. He tasted blood in his throat. "Damn your souls!"

The punk with the white hair fired again into Jason's skull.

"Tartaro occultus Hecate, dominus mysteria as occultus Thanatos!" Jason's voice trailed off.

"He's still alive!" The shooter emptied his gun into Jason's head until it started clicking. It wasn't personal. It was just business. Everyone was disposable to him. His buddy had the cash and they were now free to scramble covered in blood to toss away their shirts and dive into the 1986 Monte Carlo parked in the brush. His African American partner turned the engine over and hit the gas pedal to purposely drive over the body of Jason Troy they were leaving behind. Tires screeched against the dry asphalt heading south down the block out of this normal neighborhood reminding them of how far below the ladder of humanity they belonged.

"Twelve hundred bucks…" The driver grinned ear to ear. "Baron, he had twelve hundred bucks on him! Best hit we've had in weeks."

"I don't like the way he jumped up!" Baron Sadler sneered wiping blood on his sweating brow. "He kept coming after us until you plugged him. What about that curse stuff? Jimmy, what was that about?"

"I curse you…" Jimmy Kendall repeated it mockingly. "Screw it! He was a freak!" He listened to his car engine roaring as he forced it to carry him away. He had fine-tuned it to outrun police and the nitrous oxide underneath was his ace if police came after him. There were sirens in the distance to his ears. He couldn't tell if they were coming to him or from another direction. His mind just focused on the open dark road ahead of him. He knew this area. There were a lot of empty houses he could hide and people who owed him favors. He had just killed one person and he'd kill again to fuel his inhuman testosterone.

Baron, however, leaned forward as the car roared to the three-way stop. Someone was in the road waiting for them to get closer. Was it a cop? No, they were clad completely in long flowing robes and a long rifle lifting up to meet them. No, it was not a rifle. It was a long twisted rod with a curved blade and the face of the wielder looking at them from those dark robes wasn't human after all. It was a skull looking at them with glee. Kendall hit the gas and plowed the grillwork of his muscle car through the image of the grinning the grim reaper before him and hit… nothing. The figure slashed at them as they passed through it. Beyond it, Baron looked too late to the wall of the cemetery rearing up on him. The Monte Carlo plummeted over Harmon Avenue and crashed through its seven foot steel fence and shattered stone markers behind it. The several small immovable objects stopped the charging vehicle and even rendered through the engine block. Kendall's chest hit his steering wheel hard and Sadler struck the windshield with his head. A brief few seconds later, he found himself undeservingly still alive and being pulled out into complete darkness by human hands.

"What was that? What was that?" He cried out.

"Someone's screwing with us, man!" Kendall hurriedly reloaded his pistol with loose bullets from the floorboard of the car. "Let's go!"

Baron knew better than to tick Jimmy off in the middle of escaping from the police, but he knew he didn't want to be here. It took him a while, but slowly he recognized the tombstones and grave markers around him. For him, Halloween came this hot summer night. Rushing over graves and burial sites, he slowly realized something was not right. Jimmy then stopped him and held him back.

"Who's there?" Jimmy held his gun on the figure in the darkness before him. "Come and get a piece of this!" He peered through the muddled shadows of trees and untrimmed shrubbery and realized he was looking at a figure in white, but a man with sullen features and an immaterial body. He fired on it, but the bullet hit nothing. Baron started screaming as he saw other figures rushing for them. An eyeless woman in a prairie dress without eyes and thin arms clutched for him out of nowhere. Several other figures in shades of white, light gray, pale blue and dirty green wearing tattered period clothing surrounded them en masse. Kendall refused to accept what he was seeing. He continued shooting and firing until his pistol was empty. He should have brought his revolver with the clip, but even then, it might not have been very useful. His eyes ablaze with terror, he screamed not for help but out of frustration. They just kept coming. They just kept coming. The spirits of the dead surrounded him were ganging up on him as his pistol fell from his shaking hands. He was afraid of nothing! Nothing!

"Sadler!" He screamed over their mournful shrieks. "Where are you, man? Where are you?" More eyeless specters reached for him and gripped at him with steel grips and bony arms. It couldn't be real! It couldn't be! If he could last till morning, he'd wake up, and the sunlight would reveal it was just a dream. It had to. There was no such thing as ghosts!

The sun eventually did come up and Police Captain Jim Brass found himself staring at the wrecked and deserted Monte Carlo twenty feet into the cemetery over shattered and broken tombstones and upturned earth from the direction of Puckett Street across Harmon Avenue. The cemetery caretakers were not going to like this damage. An officer had reported the wreck at seven o'clock. The morning dew had dried and he was facing a mystery that defied the lengths of logic. Criminologist Gil Grissom also arrived not far from him. The morning sun quickly baked his bare forehead as Grissom pulled on tinted glasses and he grabbed his forensic kit. Rational, logical and astute, he looked up to Brass with another of those faces that made his morning.

"I've got Sidle on the shooting victim." He started. "Is this the car of our suspected shooters?"

"Yeah," Brass looked at him a bit unnerved and steered him away from going over it for forensics. "I've got something else to show you." He flipped open his pad to read it to Grissom. "Car is registered to one James Kendall, eighteen. Escaped juvie with one Baron Sadler, seventeen, last month, the two of them both have records for assault, burglary, manslaughter and possession of drugs."

"Nice to know they got a hobby." Grissom walked the cemetery with Brass toward his associate Warrick Brown in the cemetery. He seemed to photographing something in the dirt.

"Last night," Brass continued. "The two of them shot and killed one Jason Scott Troy, thirty-five, a freelance artist and writer… a shot to the stomach, a shot to the chest and four to the head."

"Overkill."

"They took off in this direction, ran the stop sign and wrecked the car." Brass continued. "Officers found their bodies here two hundred and seventy-six feet from the car." Brass looked at Grissom with a look challenging him to figure this out. Grissom just moved around Warrick in stunned shock and looked to the ground. His jaw dropped and he removed his glasses in two simultaneous movements.

Kendall and Sadler had been buried in the ground upside down up to their ankles. Two pairs of high-priced sneakers still being worn by their owners were sticking out of the intact ground. The grass was undisturbed, there was no sign of disturbed topsoil and the obviously dead punks were driven into the earth by forces unknown. Warrick just continued blinking his eyes trying to get into the right mind to accept what his eyes told him. Grissom looked back to the boys' car almost two hundred feet away and back to their feet sticking out of the ground.

"How fast were they going when they hit the cemetery wall?" Grissom asked out loud.


	2. Chapter 2

Las Vegas was a city of a million stories and over a billion crimes. The Las Vegas Central Scientific Investigation team often covered anywhere from fifty to a hundred cases a week. They had one of the most advanced labs in the country and possibly the most gifted and genius level specialists in the whole United States Police Force. Nick Stokes loved his job and wished to scream it from the sky. Catherine Willows had a love/hate affair with it. She loved the work, but it took her from her daughter. She had been a single mother for going on eight years now, and she barely knew her daughter. Her extended family at CSI filled her time, but little Lindsay who had her heart often unfortunately had to take second place.

"I got the wrong case." Nick groused half-heartedly as he and Catherine took a separate case. "Grissom gets the best case and I'm poking into the disappearance of…." He checked his pad as the officer on duty allowed them entry into the two-story ranch house fenced off with police tape. "William Nathaniel Braddock."

"Thirty-nine," Katherine had studied the case enroute. "Kennel Director at the Clark County Humane Society, he went on vacation two weeks ago and didn't return to work last Monday. His manager called him three times, came by here looking for him and then reported him missing." Catherine poked through mail on a small table behind the door. The most current letter was dated eight days ago so that meant Braddock vanished while he was still in the middle of his vacation. She flicked on her penlight and perused over seemingly non-disturbed furniture and bric-a-brac. The setting was modest, and the layout was simple. A basic chair and sofa set around a coffee table before a TV, VCR and DVD set with tables a desk and shelf of books to the wall. One door led to the kitchen and another adjoining one to the dining area. Nick peered down the hallway to a few steps heading up to the bedrooms and upstairs bathroom. The stairs at his eye level revealed three four open doorways and shutter doors to a closet.

"A lot of dust." Nick observed. "I get the feeling this guy didn't do a lot of housecleaning."

"Most bachelors don't." Catherine answered scrutinizing for areas where it was disturbed. "It will at least tell us what's been moved or disturbed." She turned to see Nick doing a quick sweep upstairs and turning round to come back to her.

"He's got one bedroom, one room like a study and another with a pool table." He described what he saw. "I don't have a set-up like this. How does a guy who does grunt work afford to live alone like this?"

"I talked to his manager." Catherine scrutinized for signs of an answering machine that didn't exist. She thought it might have been taken, but the undisturbed dust around the phone suggested to her Braddock just didn't own one. "She said that Braddock lived alone with his parents until they retired to Florida. The house was paid off so all he has is the yearly taxes. Braddock even took his father's old job." She panned over book titles in Braddock's collection and slowly started surmising his lonely existence. "Let's see the basement."

"Okay," Nick looked into the kitchen and saw a door against the wall between the living room and kitchen. His rubber-gloved hand turned the knob and opened the door to reveal stairs descending under the house deep into a dark maw of darkness he knew he'd be entering. Catherine checked the light switch with her light for latent prints and flicked the lights on as Nick stopped at the bottom third and looked to the room under him. Along the wall stretching the three quarters the perimeter of the room was a tabletop train that made him a kid once more. It even extended into an island into the room with an operating switch in the middle and a passage into the adjacent laundry room alongside the staircase.

"This guy is my new best friend!" Nick hurried down and marveled at the exquisite detail work. There was a highly exquisite three-quarter inch civilization stretched out before him on thirty square feet with tunnels, roads, houses, people, animals set in a miniature three-dimensional Norman Rockwell world under a wall-painted horizon. A tiny girl's lemonade stand stood near a small general store before a stalled train. Boys ran past a tiny styrene haunted house with boarded windows. A train conductor and rail man waited at switcher. It would take Nick hours to examine every minutiae and creation on this tiny set. Even Katherine was humbled at it.

"Guess we know where he spends his time." She noticed Nick regressing back to childhood and scanned the room from the spackled ceiling over to the roll top desk under the shelves under the only bare wall in the room. Her eyes perused bottles of paint lined up in single file up high while tools for working in miniature set in dusk around disassembled train cars, section of track and old metal tins with millimeter screws and bolts. She panned up looking for prints and then down for signs of recent activity and then noticed speckles of red at her feet. Nick noticed her discovery and loomed by her side.

"Blood?" He wondered out loud.

"Red latex paint." Catherine noticed the trail of the lost and broken glass bottle from its space up above. "Get a sample." She stood up straight once more and trying to avoid getting distracted by the train entered the adjacent laundry room. The downstairs sink, washer, dryer and water heater were along the back of the house. Against the wall to the room of the train set was a tall metal cabinet for hanging clothes. Opening it up, plastic wrap covering clothes resembled the entryway to fabled Narnia. However, as she perused closer, she realized she was not looking at old suits or outdated gym clothes. She was looking at full length, high collar dresses and gowns. It made her want to start speculating.

"Doesn't everything we've seen so far show Braddock lives alone?" She replied.

"Yeah…" Nick had the paint sample.

"Well," Catherine noticed dresses she would have liked to own. "Who do you think these belong to?"

At CSI Headquarters at the Las Vegas Police Station, City Corner Doctor Albert Robbins covered and scrutinized the bodies of desirables known as James Eugene Kendall and his partner Baron Victor Sadler. Having expired and stripped to all they had entered the world with, they looked like the once normal human boys they once were instead of the foul creatures thy lived as. Robbins hobbled by cane on his good leg as Gil Grissom and Sara Sadler analyzed the bodies for the answers to tell them and the circumstances of their deaths.

"How did they die?" Grissom asked the question at the top of the hour.

"Asphyxiation." Robbins answered as he produced his x-rays. "Both boys had topsoil from the graveyard in their mouths, nasal cavities, throats, esophagus, lungs and stomachs. It's almost as if they were drilled into the ground head first."

"Is that possible?" Sara asked.

"No," Robbins answered. "And they were not driven into the ground by the force of the crash, either, otherwise their bones would have shattered on impact and turned them into jelly."

"There is no way they could have flown from the car and landed where they did." Grissom continued working this boggling case in his mind. "According to the tire tread evidence, they were only doing seventy-five miles an hour when the hit the steel fence around the cemetery and that slowed them to fifty-six. At most, they flew through the windshield and landed seven feet from their car."

"But…" Sara added. "The windshield was shattered, but not broken and the doors were open. They were either alive to leave the car or be removed from it because they were still alive when they were drilled into the ground."

"I can tell you something else." Robbins looked to the x-rays. "Kendall has hairline fractures in his ribs in a circular pattern…"

"From the steering wheel…" Grissom remarked.

"And Sadler has glass fragments in a hairline fracture in his skull."

"From the windshield." Sara answered like a young ingénue. "That explains the passenger side shatter."

"I also did blood work." Robbins picked up his findings. "They both were on PCP at the time and their adrenaline levels through the roof. The epinephrine levels in both of them were above normal. I'd say their pulses were racing when they died."

"They were likely hallucinating just before the time of death." Grissom mentioned. "Which explains why they were shooting up the cemetery, but not how or why they were buried in the ground."

"Maybe they weren't hallucinating." Sara looked up. "Maybe someone, not something, was freaking them out."

"Grissom…" Warrick Brown stuck his head into the room with an expression of annoyed disbelief in his face. "There's this guy from the FBI who wants to talk to you."

"The FBI?" Grissom reacted equally annoyed. "About what?"

"About Jason Troy." Warrick answered. Grissom looked to Sara for answers and then to Robbins. Robbins just stood mute witness to the how the events unfolded and watched as Grissom scowled a bit. It was not out of annoyance, but past grievances showed that he did not hold the Bureau with high regard. With Sara and Warrick in his path, he started forward for his office and noticed a figure in his office handling his jar with the preserved pig fetus with curiosity. Idle and professional, the agent looked up to him with expressed interest and subdued restraint.

"Can I help you?" Gil Grissom started.

"Federal Agent Fox Mulder of the FBI, X Files Division…" Their guest showed his identification. "I'd like to know what you learned about the death of Jason Scott Troy."

"What kind of a first name is Fox?" Sara asked first.


	3. Chapter 3

"Jason Scott Troy…" Mulder sat and shared info from files and papers from the bureau. "Born on January 9, 1970, the son of fashion model and actress Helen Troy, father unknown; his grandfather is James Peter Reason, the philanthropist andowner and chief stockholderof Olympian Industries, a multi-million dollar company…"

"Nice to have a rich grandfather…" Warrick mentioned across from Sarah.

"Twelve years ago, Troy lived in San Marcos, Texas…" Mulder continued. "Where the Bureau was investigating murders of a… cult like nature."

"Human sacrifices?" Grissom guessed.

"Correct…" Mulder continued. "A group of modern day Hecate worshippers. She was an ancient goddess of the underworld…"

"Troy was a member of the cult…" Sara responded.

"Troy was our informant." Mulder pressed on. "He helped us to expose the activities and bring the cult to trial. We sent him here to Las Vegas under the witness protection program and now he's dead."

"I really doubt Kendall and Sadler were sent to silence him after the fact." Grissom reacted with fault. "They wanted to rob him. They held him at gunpoint and took him of his money. They killed him because he fought back."

"Mr. Grissom…" Mulder could tell clashing with this guy was not a feud he wanted to start. "A Federal informant has been killed. My superiors want me to look into your investigation."

"Then let us do it." Grissom continued as Sara and Warrick watched speechless. "I'm sorry, but I've had bad experiences with you guys from the bureau."

"I know of your experiences with the FBI from the Strip Killer case." Mulder had done his work. "Believe me, Agent Richard Culpeper is not indicative of the FBI. I'm only here to observe and report." He turned to Warrick. "Have you formulated a sequence of events from the previous night?"

"Yeah, I got it punched this morning." Warrick had the computer simulation ready. "This is based on the cumulative evidence from the blood splatter on the lot, partial security camera evidence from across the street, measurements of the tire skid marks and gunshot triangulation at the cemetery." He used a remote control to switch on the screen. Computer generated graphics portrayed the simplest version of the street where Troy had died. A non-detailed figure in flesh tone represented Troy while similar figures played Kendall and Sadler in brown and white. Warrick narrated the simulation created from the gathered evidence.

"The victim departs the store at 10:03 and travels south down Puckett." He described the animation. "Sadler had flash burns on him proving he shot first from behind the lot and the bullet drops Troy. Kendall then gangs up on Troy forcing him to the ground. As Troy fights, he kicks Kendall back and opens himself up for another shot from Sadler firing to the chest this time…."

Sara narrowed her eyes and tried to understand inhumanity to man.

"Troy, however, is still alive." Warrick answers. "Blood splatter shows he managed to slide sideways and backward five feet to where Sadler pulls out the second gun we found in the car and fires point blank into Troy's head. Troy, however, is still conscious and losing blood. His heart was still beating."

"He's made of tough stuff." Sara responds. "Sadler and Kendall never had anyone confront them like this. Troy might have lived if he hadn't fought back."

"Sadler and Kendall depart the scene in the Monte Carlo heading south up Puckett at fifty miles an hour." Warrick continued as a computer graphic boarded by animated figures raced before them. "They gradually increase their speed to sixty and then make this odd swerve just before the end of the street at Harmon."

"Looks as if they tried to hit something in the center of the road." Mulder noticed.

"There was nothing there." Sidle revealed. "We checked the car bumper for impact evidence. We found nothing there."

"Something they hallucinated?" Grissom answered.

"They are doing a full seventy five miles an hour when they crash the fence and the drag of the cemetery slows them to fifty six before they finally stop." Warrick continued. "Surviving the impact, they getout of the car and reach this area where they are standing in the epicenter of the shots fired. I found eleven shots buried in tombstones, trees and a mausoleum."

"What were they shooting at?" Mulder asked.

"Look at the simulation…" Grissom pointed to the screen. "All the shots were fired at the same level in a directionless field around them. They weren't shooting at one thing; they were firing at multiple hallucinations coming at them at all sides." He paused. "But something physical drowned them underground."

"What do you think they think they were shooting at?" Sara wondered.

"Ghosts?" Warrick answered. "Harmon Cemetery has had a reputation of being haunted back to 1923."

"I don't believe in ghosts." Grissom answered. "But look at the range of their shots. They were firing indiscriminately at something coming at them at chest level. Why would they do that?" Above him, the door to his office poked open and lab tech Greg Sanders looked in. Fox Mulder noticed the headphones around his neck and Hawaiian shirt under his open lab coat.

"Grissom," He held up a file. "I found something odd from the toxicology on Troy's blood. I even ran it three times to explain it, but I can't figure out what it is." He handed over the file with the bravado that he made another big discovery. Tapping his glasses, Grissom read the files and tried to understand what he was reading. He looked back up to Greg to Warrick and Sara and then over to Mulder before looking back up to Greg.

"Surreal, ain't it." Greg answered.

"What?" Sara wanted to know. She took the file and shared it with Warrick for perusal. "An extra chromosome? Where does someone get an extra chromosome?" She looked to Grissom and then to Mulder who sat across from her without a response or an interest.

"You already knew about it." Grissom had another reason to hate Government agents. They were always keeping secrets.


	4. Chapter 4

PART FOUR

Robbins returned slowly back to the autopsy lab. He pressed against the doors with the body of a dead vagrant from the morning CSI staff ahead of him and instead found he had living company. A very attractive red haired physician of some sort was dissecting Sadler's remains on the table by him.

"Excuse me, what are you doing here?" He asked.

"Federal agent Dana Scully," The lovely lady revealed her experience through her handling of his tools. "I hope you don't mind, but I made myself to home."

"I see that."

"I notice you tested Sadler's blood for agents." Scully answered. "How about his heart?"

"Normal." He flashed her his copy of his report. "It was still beating while he was fighting for air."

"But he wasn't getting air." Scully revealed with a non-committal look at the bearded coroner. "He was breathing in topsoil." She turned with a bowl of material removed from Sadler and weighed it on a scale. "About five point eight ounces of it in total not counting stones, below the surface debris and portions of bone."

"Bone?"

"He was pulled down head first into the grave of one Isaiah Laurence, a lawman from 1937 buried in the grave under him." Scully gasped and looked the body of Sadler over again. "No stress on the legs of the victim, but obvious stress on the underarms and upper body. No trace of ropes, tools or epithelials though. He was pulled underground."

"By what?" Robbins challenged the notion that any young man could be jerked underground. "Ghosts?"

"Why would you use that word?" Scully snapped off her gloves and tossed them before removing her glasses.

"Since I have been living in Las Vegas," Robbins looked over the vagrant brought in for him to examine. "I have heard repeating ghost stories from all over the strip. All the hotels have at least one about phantom guests or restless employees. The cemetery is no exemption. Officers check on inexplicable lights there all the time." He beamed hoping he had spooked her. Instead, she just folded her arms and narrowed her eyes trying to explain him.

"However," Robbins continued. "I'm a man of science. I've never heard a story that I felt couldn't be explained with a modicum of logic and common sense."

"How does one get pulled underground?" Scully asked.

"Vicious gophers?"

Catherine Willows and Nick Stokes meanwhile arrived at the loading docks of a plain blue warehouse marked Guthrie Furniture, a local furniture outlet.

Beyond the halls of the police station, Catherine Willows wore sunglasses as a guard from the sun. Nick, however, took one last sip from his soft drink and left it in the floorboard of the car expecting the lack of direct sunlight would delay the heating of his beverage. A glance to Catherine and he then turned and arched his head up to the bold black letters above his head reading Guthrie Furniture. They furnished simple to extravagant furniture to most if not all the hotels in the greater Las Vegas area. The warehouse was five stories tall and tiered with levels of chair, disassembled lamps and tightly packaged ready to assemble table among every sort of gambling extravagance to be believed. Michael McKinnon loaded furniture on to trucks here with a forklift, but when two police scientists arrived to question him, he took it casual and aloof until he knew what he might or might not be in trouble with this time. If it wasn't his ex-wife, it was his brother. McKinnon's employer was used to police coming to talk to his more colorful employees, but it was a first with McKinnon. The routine was the same each time: give the possible troublemaker a long lunch and then hope the idiot was innocent so he could finish the job by five o'clock.

"Mr. McKinnon," Catherine led the interrogation. "You worked for three months last year at the Clark County Humane Society." She looked to McKinnon in his white tank top and blue jeans. His sandy blonde hair was cut military style, he had the traces of a shaved goatee with five o'clock shadow and his build was wiry. A tattoo on his left arm read, "Kill all the lawyers!" He sat down with lunch out of a white plastic grocery bag.

"Yeah," McKinnon was not allowed to drink alcohol on the job. He pulled out his soft drink and sandwiches before the two CSI agents. "I was let go because of a misunderstanding."

"Misunderstanding?" Nick spoke up. "You were fired because you were stealing supplies."

"Not really," McKinnon sipped his drink with a trace of a derogative smirk. "We had an overflow of pet food there. We couldn't use it up fast enough before the rats got to it; so, Corrine, she was the manager, she let us take what we could to keep the rat problem down."

"You had cats there." Catherine realized. "How could you have rats?"

"They don't go in the rooms with the cats." Mike replied. "They go in the room where the food is. It's a twenty-foot long storeroom there and the bags of food are stacked eight feet high from end to end on a concrete floor and we were constantly being donated more. No one donates cleaning supplies, but if their dogs don't eat something, we get it. Believe it or not, but dogs are just as finicky as cats and they don't eat what they don't like."

"You weren't fired for stealing food." Catherine read the account from Corrine Holloway, the manager. "You also took a computer and donations for a fund-raiser."

"I was lead to believe the computer was being tossed out and a newer model would be replacing it." McKinnon continued eating his lunch. "It was all just a major understanding."

"How much of an understanding was it when William Braddock caught you abusing the animals?" Nick asked.

"Is that what this is about?" McKinnon looked disgusted and rolled his eyes. "Look, people are continually confusing the shelter with the dog pound. The place was set up to find homes for strays and unwanted dogs, but people kept dumping us with puppies, puppies, puppies and more puppies of every size, shape and breed. The place didn't have that kind of space and no one wants a dog that's going to be bigger than they want when it grows up. No one wants puppies, but they don't bother neutering dogs. I just sort of lost it because we had twelve different litters at once and no cages left. You know, just when you think there isn't a dog owner left in this county… Bam! We get ten more. We kept getting them from out of the county and across the state line!"

"Did you have a beef with Braddock when he reported you for whipping a dog with a leash?" Nick asked.

"No," McKinnon answered. "He did me a favor getting me out of that job. You know, I had to be up at seven in the morning to have the dogs run clean when we opened at nine and there was fifty of them. Puppies are worse because they crap everywhere. Even in their food and water. Here, I don't have to be here till nine and no one cares what I look like when I get here because I don't have to deal with the public."

"When was the last time you saw Braddock?" Catherine asked.

"The last time I was at the shelter." McKinnon answered. "Look, if you want to know where he is, check with his girlfriend, Dena Short. She could drive him nuts."

"In what way?"

"Mind games…" McKinnon responded with a dramatic air. "She would make plans for him and not tell him. She made plans for him to help her move to a new apartment while he was working, and then came by the shelter and chewed him out for not showing up. You know, she was a fine-looking thing, but I wouldn't let a girl, no matter the rack she had, make me jump through no rings."

"Did she abuse him?" Catherine head a cell phone go off and turned to Nick. He stood and took the call as she continued interviewing McKinnon.

"She'd call him names…" McKinnon vaguely recalled screaming matches he had eavesdropped on from behind the long side hall looking out the side cages at the shelter. "I think she kind of controlled that relationship. Braddock was always taking about breaking it off with her."

"Catherine…" Nick called her.

"Just a minute…" Catherine stood and joined Nick in the hall outside the employee break room. Nick had more news, but she had better news. Standing before snack and shadow machines, she paused took a breath and gained her composure. "Braddock might not just be missing. We might be looking at a murder. He's either on the run, or a victim."

"Greg got a match from the epithelials on the dresses from the basement." Nick lowered his voice realizing he had something that put the case on its side. "He matched DNA from them on known epithelials from the vic."

"He was a cross dresser?" Catherine realized.

"Straight out of the mind of Norman Bates."

"How much like Norman Bates?"


	5. Chapter 5

PART FIVE

"Willows," Jim Brass noticed her walk past him and hastened to catch up with her. "Here's the report from the police in Cheyenne, Wyoming where Alicia Braddock lives." He handed her a file faxed from the out of state police. Catherine slowed to read it while Brass thrust his hands into his pockets. "She confirmed your suspicion."

"She knew her brother was a cross dresser?" Catherine couldn't believe it.

"She encouraged it." Brass sounded like he got a kick out of hearing the odd idiosyncrasies of other people. "She didn't seem to like having a brother, but she loved turning him into her little sister." Brass chuckled out the corner of his mouth. "However, she did remark that she thought he was trying to break that bad habit."

"Could be when the girlfriend came into the picture…" Catherine started thinking. "Transvestites only dress up to fulfill a sexual change or gratification, and when Short entered his life, he might have decided to put an end to that little . However, the experience might have confused him more than he was ready for and he might have snapped."

"Sounds like your case got interesting." Sara glided up to Catherine and Brass.

"It just turned south." Catherine remarked. "How about yours?"

"I got three dead people." She replied unimpressed. "I know how they died, but I can't find a trace of another set of killers in the corporeal sense."

"Still missing evidence?" Brass asked.

"Missing?" Sara rolled her eyes. "More like non-existent. Warrick and I have traced Sadler and Kendall from Troy to the cemetery, but we can't trace anyone from the cemetery. We've talked to the caretaker and morticians and mourners from the last known funeral, and we're getting nowhere. I'm waiting on a ground analysis from Greg and Warrick and Grissom are checking the cemetery for sinkholes."

"Sinkholes?"

"Do you have a better suggestion?" Sara asked perplexed and bewildered.

"An open grave?" Brass thought out loud. "I recall stories of people getting tapped in those things caving in all the time."

"I already ruled that out." Sara shook her brown locks out of her face. "Usually when someone is inside a grave that caves it, they get completely covered in soft earth; the weight of the dirt presses them to their feet, but in this case, the vics had to have been held suspended as the grave caved in around them, but we ruled that out because it was stable soil and an intact lawn and there was no contact on their ankles. The only contact was on the upper arms and shoulders as if they were…"

"Dragged head first…" Catherine had heard a lot of really good ghost stories, but this one beat them all.

"That's not the only thing." Sara fumbled with a file. "The first DB has an extra chromosome, but no record of Down's syndrome or trisomy. In fact, he was highly gifted, extremely healthy and a fully contributing member of society."

"Well," Catherine looked to Brass enjoying this meeting of the minds. "Trisomy depends on which chromosome has been duplicated."

"Not duplicated…" Sara liked repeating this tidbit to freak out her peers. "A twenty-fourth chromosome unlike the first twenty-three."

"But the human body only has twenty three chromosomes, right?" Brass recalled his high school biology as well, but he was also interested in activity going on in the direction of pathology. Grissom had been rousted from his cockroaches from another case and Doctor Robbins was speaking down to Jeremy his assistant. The morgue was suddenly very active as Grissom put aside thoughts of his Blattus domesticus species and emerged into the heart of the predicament. He and Brass turned to Robbins for his account of another problem in a current case.

"There's a body missing." Robbins revealed.

"Who? Which one?"

"Jason Troy." Robbins answered. "He wasn't in cold storage where I put him."

"Well," Brass raised his left eyebrow. "He didn't walk away now, did he?"


	6. Chapter 6

PART SIX

"I don't understand. How can you lose my grandson's body?" James Peter Reason was a tall intimidating figure and presence of a man. Six feet and three inches tall, he had thick red hair with traces of white in his strong beard and broad chin. He didn't fit the image of a man who ran a multi-million dollar company that owned properties and businesses and donated money to the arts and antiquities. Except for his dark blue Italian suit and black tie, he looked more at home sitting in robes on a mountaintop and tossing off lightning bolts at people he didn't like when he wasn't sexually carousing with young beauties. His voice was very powerful and as full as that one might expect from a king of gods.

"Well, technically," Grissom looked up to J. Peter Reason and pulled off his glasses. "We haven't lost him, we just don't know where he is."

"His mother is going to be very upset." Reason grumbled a bit under breath with his large barrel chest filling with air. "He was her only son and she cared for him very much. She and her sisters are at my cousin's villa in Ontario. Do you want to tell me what I'm going to tell her?"

"We offer our blessings." Grissom asked.

"If you don't mind me asking…" Brass stood behind Grissom in a professional role as police liaison to the case. "How many children do you have?"

"Enough…" Reason exhaled deeply and intimidatingly. "I've been married twelve times and have children from young ladies I never shared in matrimony and my wife hates all her step-children. She gave my young son Harrison fits when he was younger and virtually drove Apollo's mother out of her home."

"Apollo…" Brass looked up. "The pop star? He's your son?"

"Yes," Reason beamed. "I'm very proud of him. He's having more success now than he ever did. He's right back on top where he should be."

"Apollo…" Grissom wasn't up on the New Wave scene, but he was more adept in other fields. "Named after the Greek god of inspiration… Jason's mother, Helen, named after the face that launched the Trojan War, and himself after the leader of the Argonauts." He paused very intrigued. "Your family seems very influenced by Greek myth, Mr. Reason." He paused and realized another parallel. "J. Peter Reason. Jupiter… Rhea's son…" He cocked his head and became even more fascinated.

"It's a family thing…" Reason pulled out an old-style antique pocket watch from his vest pocket inside his coat and checked the time. "I must really be going anyway. I've an appointment in Norway with Alfadur Odinson and I must be catching a flight. I'd fly myself, but…" Reason grinned at the humor of his next statement. "You'd be surprised how many things people mistake for flying saucers."

Dena Short sat in an accompanying conference room. Short, petite, brunette and attractive as a frail porcelain doll, she sipped a small Styrofoam cup of coffee across from Nick Stokes and Catherine Willows. She'd never been in the police station, much less met a police officer and when she was bright in to talk to the forensic criminologists, she didn't know what to think. She hadn't seen William in two weeks and she was scared to death they were going to setting her up to take a fall.

"When was the last time you saw William Braddock?" Nick asked.

"A week, two weeks ago maybe…" Dena reacted vulnerably childlike.

"Was your relationship with him…" Nick mulled around a bit. "Amicable?"

"I loved him." Dena confessed. "I wanted to marry him. He could be… oh, so exasperating, but he was the most sensitive guy I ever knew. It was almost as if…"

"He was in touch with his female side?" Catherine finished her thought.

"Yes…"

"Were you aware that he was a transvestite prior to your relationship?" Catherine asked the question.

"What?" Dena reacted as if this was news to her. "That's not funny. He wasn't gay!"

"Transvestites aren't homo sexuals, and before you beg to differ…" Nick opened his file on the case. "We found his… old wardrobe in storage in his house and talked to his sister in Wyoming. She confirmed it."

"He's got a sister?" The brunette ingénue reacted again. "He told me he was an only child!"

"Kind of makes you wonder what else he hasn't told you, doesn't it?" Catherine pointed out. "Do you have any idea where he is or where he could have gone?"

"I don't know." Dena tried thinking past the revelation she had just been hit with. "There's this Asian buffet I know he frequents… He once asked me to go on a trip to California."

"We'll check it out." Catherine looked to Nick briefly. "If he took a trip, he shouldn't have any suitcases in his house."

"I don't think he owned suitcases." Dena revealed.

"That makes it a bit harder." Catherine answered.


	7. Chapter 7

PART SEVEN

"This is a work of art." Brass stood impressed in the company of Nick and Catherine re-investigating Braddock's house, but he just had to see this legendary train set for himself. "When I was a kid, we had the old HO Scale which was a little bigger and a lot of the same accessories, but it didn't have the magnitude or attention to detail of these smaller sets."

"Wait," Nick stood up straight. "Do you notice anything missing from it?"

"Like what," Catherine looked upper the sprawling small town under her. "Buildings, people, cars, trees, brooks, a lake…."

"Where's the train?" Nick pointed out. She looked at him and realized that only someone who understood these sets would get that reference. Brass stooped to his feet and looked through the train set at eyelevel and Catherine raced her light over the tracks in several loops through its business and residential areas. There was no train. She turned to the work area with the paints, parts and tools, but there was no engines, extra cars or anything else. Who made a tabletop train but forgot the train?

"Maybe it's in there?" Brass pointed to a tunnel built to fit the corner of the room. Two tracks at table level entered and exited the paper-mache mountain, but another on a small-scale steel girder bridge entered and didn't come out. Catherine looked to the end of the table near the entrance to the laundry room and noticed another tunnel going onto the wall.

"It goes into the wall?" She realized. "How does he get it out if it jumps the tracks?"

"Maybe…" Nick stooped for a hidey-hole under the train set and noticed something else. There were hinges where a section of the table neatly folded up. He stood, carefully lifted and raised a section of the table set between buildings. When he lifted the section, he could more than plainly notice the door to the room behind the wall pop open. The train set rested right on the door handle and obscured it. Catherine pulled it open and started entering with her light ablaze to look inside.

"Well, that's genius." Brass commented. "The train gets so big that he closes up part of the basement." He reached to poke his head in, but the second Nick let go of the section of table, it slammed back down with a thunderous crash. Tiny people glued in place partially vibrated and the more sturdily constructed buildings received their tremor-like crash to a lesser degree. The vibration jarred two of the bottles of paint at the work desk to shatter on the floor with the previously shattered red paint. Brass snapped to attention and realized what was happening before him. He helped Nick to re-lift the section of table again to unseal Catherine from inside the secret room beyond the wall.

"Are you okay?" Nick looked at her again.

"Well, that was a bad scare…." She looked at him with relief that she had not been entombed in the house. With Nick holding the way open, Brass took a quick look around. Boxes were disturbed, clothes were strewn around and an old model TV was plugged into a forgotten electrical plug. Two complete sets of train cars with engines and boxcars lined the back where they had crashed headfirst into each other. Next to the entrance, Catherine hovered over the unconscious body of William Nathaniel Braddock where he had dropped after getting trapped inside. Nick read the scene at once. He pictured William running two trains at once and reacting when they entered the tunnels at once. After hearing the collision, he then reentered the old storage space and got trapped inside when the table crashed down again. The impact of which had shattered the red paint bottle at his work area. He had been trapped in the wall for almost two weeks without food and water as he screamed to the empty house above him for help without response.

"He's still alive!" Catherine recognized pupilary response from Braddock as she checked him. "Call 911!"

"I'm on it!" Brass reacted with his cell.

"And that's…" Nick held the entrance open. "…Why you should always have your cell phone on you at all times."


	8. Chapter 8

PART EIGHT

Dr. Robbins was scrutinizing the remains of a female jogger who had been missing for three and a half-months. Suspecting rape, he began checking for tell-tale vaginal tears. As he looked, he received an interested glance from his company. Still dissecting the remains of James Kendall, she stood up straight, cracking her back and lifted her metal clipboard to write another note. Her white lab coat looked as if it belonged in a butcher shop, and her once perfect coif of red hair was a bit askew even for a person too dedicated to her job. There was a creak, a groan and a cursory bit of light entering the dim room as she and Robbins looked up together. Standing dear the entrance, Fox Mulder looked distantly over to her with a look of complacency, over to Robbins peering back to him over his eyeglasses and back to Scully with an aura of distant interest.

"Well," He started. "What about it?"

"Neither Sadler nor Kendall were killed by anything human." Her plastic gloves snapped as she pulled them off. "Topsoil in their bodies matches the topsoil of the cemetery, there are no epithelials on their upper bodies to explain the marks on their shoulders and underarms and there are no such things as ghosts." She looked at him daringly to contest her report.

"The only reason people say that is that parapsychology is not a recognized science." Mulder was quick to point out. "We knows cows and dogs exist because we all took basic school biology, but the only reason everyone says ghosts don't exist is because they never take the time to do the research, yet, ghostly phenomenon occurs practically once every thirty seconds somewhere on the planet with more frequency ahead of one person being mugged every one minute. What does that tell you? Sadler and Kendall were pulled underground by the spirits of once living people because Jason Scott Troy somehow knew how to call upon them."

"Mulder…" Scully briefly mumbled instructions to Robbins' assistant to reclaim Kendall's body then turned back to her partner. "Every bizarre death is not proof of ghosts. Sadler and Kendall likely died because of a string of unlikely and unconnected circumstances. One, they were extremely under the influence and likely hallucinating, two, they were driving extremely fast prior to their deaths, three, most of Las Vegas is built on desert with a high chance of sinkholes, and four, did I mention there are no such things as ghosts?"

"If you turn out a light, does the electricity disappear?" Mulder expressed a belief. "When a person dies, what happens to their memories and personality? Doesn't science say that everything goes somewhere? What about this human spirit that is the basic tenet of every known religion on earth? Science doesn't know everything that happens at death; there's no evidence that ghosts do not exist."

"I'm on his side." Robbins looked up.

"Thank you!" Mulder looked at him.

"What?"

"If you weigh a person just before they die and compare their exact weight after they die, there is always a .000053 variant difference. I've often wondered where the missing weight goes and then it dawned on me." Robbins paused for affect and looked at the remains of his female jogger. "The weight of the human soul having departed the living body." He gestured over the cadaver before him as proof of what he was saying.

"But that doesn't mean that it stays here on the planet to make noises from attics and appear in photographs for the TV series Unsolved Mysteries." Grissom slipped into pathology behind Mulder. "Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that the best way to come to a solution is to eliminate all likely possibilities until you find the last however even unlikely solution."

"Mr. Grissom," Mulder folder him arms while Scully took the time to shorn herself of her white coat and discard it. "How do explain a whole family with names, relationships and personalities identical to the figures in Greek Mythology?"

"My father's name was Charles," Grissom started. "His sister's name is Lucy and I have a cousin Linus married to a girl named Sally and they a son named Schroeder. Some families adopt very cult-like characteristics, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are thousands of years old and were once worshipped by our ancestors as gods."

"Mr. Grissom," Dana liked anyone with a gifted intelligence and highly rational personality. "Have you ever considered working as a Federal agent?"

"I couldn't pass the mandatory I.Q. test." Grissom eyed her over with intrigue. "They said I rated too high for their standards." He turned to Robbins about the jogger then realized just how busy the forensics lab could get. Captain Brass opened the pathology door open with a new unexpected incident to challenge their collective intelligence.

"Shooting at a diner, eleven people dead, everyone heads out…" He announced. Grissom briefly eyed Robbins as the FBI Agents in his company and hoped the dead lady jogger wasn't getting up anytime soon. After a brisk pace to his office, he grabbed and pulled on his jacket, lifted up his forensic kit sitting at a ready location and headed out with Warrick Brown on his heels with the manner of military agents rushing to war.

"Great…" Warrick didn't react with much interest. "Gangland slaying?"

"I don't know." Grissom looked back at him as if he wanted him to tell him. "Maybe… but we won't know till we get the evidence collected and read."

"I'm putting on my boots." Sara sat down and removed her pumps. "Something tells me this is going to get messy."

"I just called Nick in." Catherine stood pulling on her police jacket, checking her badge and pulling her long blonde hair out from under it.

"He's not here?" Warrick realized that they were one short. "Where is he?"

"Day off, he's off playing trains with William Braddock, his new best friend…" Catherine shined as if she had another son. "You know, Braddock and Short are talking about getting married. Nick has even offered to house sit for them during their honeymoon."

"I bet…" Warrick kept pace with her. "That loser's playing with trains and didn't invite me along. I want to see these trains."

"A new toy and men become boys." Sara tilted her head up grinning as she boarded the CSI vehicle filled with its complement of gear and accessories. Warrick slid into another vehicle with Grissom at the wheel and felt the SUV jerk forward while he still struggled with his seat belt. Catherine gingerly allowed a police car to cut before her and behind Grissom and watched traffic as she herself carried on to the crime scene.

"How's your progress in the Harmon Cemetery case?" Catherine started with chitchat.

"Cold…" Sara confessed. "It's on the back burner until we get more info or get more data off the car." She paused and felt her thoughts drifting over the facts in the case. "I still don't understand how we misplaced Jason Troy's body."

"There's Nick." Catherine pointed out Nick turning off ahead of them in his SUV heading for their crime scene. Lifting her head up, her eyes caught something else. Blending in with the crowd of pedestrians fascinated by the flurry of police lights was a figure she knew. Standing by a figure in black, Jason Scott Troy locked eyes on her and recognized her too as Sara's jaw dropped. A shudder danced up her spine as if someone had walked over her own grave and a groaning gasp came out of the world around her as she tried denying what she was seeing. He couldn't be alive; he just couldn't.

"Sara?" Catherine called her again.

"Nothing…" Sara continued looking back as the individual people in the crowd obscured her view of Troy, but not the coldly aloof figure in black by him in the black sunglasses. With the baldhead and covered eyes, the dark figure accompanying Troy had a very reaper like appearance.

"How'd you like being dead for the first time?" His cold sepulcher voice spoke to his young ward.

"I can live without it, Uncle Hades…" Jason answered.

END


End file.
